The universal Deluge was a standard element of the view of the past in early modern Europe. Its reality was not really challenged until the modern era, but its specific details had long been subject to much scrutiny and debate. For Lydia Barnett, the debates on the Deluge offer a window on how the idea of a global environment was present in the thought of the early modern period, the focus of her book After the Flood. This is an interesting approach, although with some historical pitfalls.

The organization of the book wavers between the particular and the more general. On the one hand, Barnett discusses a number of separate episodes and specific authors. Some of these are well known, such as Thomas Burnet's Sacred Theory of the Earth (1684), Isaac de La Peyrère's Men before Adam (1656), Johann Jakob Scheuchzer's work on fossils, or Antonio Vallisneri's book on marine bodies found in the mountains. Other episodes concern minor or obscure figures, as the Paduan apothecary Camilla Erculiani, whose booklet of letters on natural philosophy was published in Cracow in 1584; the Peruvian creole Antonio de Calancha, who claimed that the natives of America were descendants of the Tartars; and the Huguenot scholar Louis Bourguet, who in some letters hypothesized on a former land bridge between Asia and the Americas. Even when discussing better-known figures, however, Barnett often uses little known sources.

On the other hand, Barnett focuses on more general ideas and organizes the book around these themes rather than around individual authors. One question she discusses concerns the extent to which theories of monogeneticism or polygeneticism affected scientific racism. The question of common ancestry was closely linked to the question of how people had repopulated the earth after the Deluge, and theories on this topic could be used to justify colonialism. That is where Calancha and Bourguet's concern with American origins comes in. Another question is the extent to which people regarded disasters such as the Deluge as having (or not having) had a lasting impact on nature generally and to what extent such disasters could be considered man-made (and hence a precursor to modern ideas about climate change). So Burnet's case mainly serves to make the point that his work demonstrates that the seventeenth century already knew “environmental reflexivity”: Burnet's “declensionist view” of history made him realize that humans, as sinners and thereby moral agents, had harmed the natural world (90). A third question concerns the way that the debates on the Deluge helped build a republic of letters by offering a common ground to Protestant and Catholic scholars, especially in the collection of fossils, and how specific confessional interpretations of the Deluge could unravel this effort.

As can be seen from the above, the content of the book is rich and varied. The various individual cases and general questions are somewhat loosely associated by the general theme. The way they are intermingled sometimes makes it hard to follow the thread of the argument, but summaries at the beginning and end of chapters, though making for some repetition, help the reader along. The description of the various episodes is generally well informed and clear. A problem can be seen in the fact that Barnett pays only little attention to the tradition of mainstream Catholic and Protestant thinking. The orthodox views on the Deluge were nevertheless the backdrop against which the various episodes she discusses should be understood. The more general questions are discussed with a wealth of ideas, although her terminology is sometimes a bit idiosyncratic; I do not really see what one gains by introducing the terms Edenocene and Fallocene for the prelapsarian and postlapsarian world, respectively. Barnett is constantly engaging with the modern literature, both on aspects of early modern history and on environmental thinking. Probably, not everybody will find the interpretation of these past discussions in terms of modern-day problems convincing, and some episodes may appear more convincing or relevant than others in sketching an early modern view of the global environment.

On balance, it would seem that Barnett is more at home in discussing general questions than in a detailed textual analysis. It is sometimes hard to dig up the essential information on her sources from her footnotes. Checking her statements may be a challenge. She only rarely includes original quotations, and the cases where she does so do not always inspire confidence. “Bagatelles” (trifles) is translated as “jewels” (145); the reformed theologian Melchior Leydekker is proclaimed Jewish, apparently because of a misunderstanding of the title of his book (13); and the caption to the frontispiece of Georg Horn's Arca Noe (6) explains that the book is a history of Noah's Flood, whereas the frontispiece itself flatly states that it is a history of world empires (as also indicated by the iconography, which refers to Daniel 7: 1–7). This is certainly a rich book, with a wealth of detail both in the text and the notes, but the strength may be more in its many ideas and engagement with modern authors rather than in purely historical analysis.